UK Current Affairs

Church Of England Parliamentary Team Revel In Their Antidemocratic Role

Samuel Hooper8 Comments

Church of England - Church and State - Parliament - Lords Spiritual - Cartoon - 2

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The Church of England’s Parliamentary Team have taken to joking on Twitter about the various ways in which they subvert British democracy. But there’s nothing funny about these modern-day theocrats

Imagine if a private sector firm had twenty six seats in the upper house of the British Parliament and possessed the ability to debate bills, lobby government ministers and even vote on Acts of Parliament – all without receiving a single vote from anyone in the United Kingdom. That organisation would be counting its undeserved blessings, and doing its best to keep a low profile and avoid drawing attention to their wildly over-privileged position.

If the RMT possessed nearly thirty votes in Parliament and used them to thwart key transport bills or trade union legislation, there would rightly be an uproar. If Tesco had their own parliamentary caucus who voted against minimum wage increases and greater employee protection rights, people would march on Westminster with burning torches to evict the voice of the Evil Corporations. And yet when the Church of England enjoys the exact same privilege – twenty six Lords Spiritual who sit in the House of Lords and exert influence over our democracy in the name of the established church – there is a deafening silence.

Well not quite. The one group of people making any kind of noise about this state of affairs are the Church of England’s own Parliamentary Team, who thought that it would be in great taste to post this cartoon on their official Twitter feed today:

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Fighting Safe Space Culture & College Censorship: The Best Weapon Is Ridicule

Samuel Hooper14 Comments

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Sometimes the best weapon against the New Age Censors on university campuses is laughter at their desire to be treated like babies

All defenders of free speech have a duty to push back against the growing hordes of petty, censorious student activists and their childish demands for trigger warnings, safe spaces and the banning of speakers with contradictory opinions from campus. But it is equally important that we do not go so far that we inadvertently give additional weight – and a false sense of seriousness – to their demands.

Scholarly articles certainly have their part to play – “In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas” by Judith Shulevitz in the New York Times, for example, was instrumental in bringing the problem of infantilised students to a wider audience. And this blog tries to contribute in its own way too, with pointed critiques of the students who want to ban clapping, demands that universities teach adults the meaning of sexual consent, and the abuse of the label “problematic” to ban unwanted ideas and opinions.

But sometimes humour can achieve more than ten earnest articles making the same point. And so it is gratifying to see both South Park and satirical newspaper The Onion take on these symptoms of student infantilisation.

South Park recently devoted an entire episode of their current season to the topic of safe spaces – see the excerpt above, or watch the entire episode online if you are based in the United States.

And as is so often the case, hearing the language of safe spaces and “harmful” ideas spout from the mouths of Randy Marsh or Eric Cartman does more to render this burgeoning culture ridiculous than all the books in the world – even the excellent “Trigger Warning: Is the fear of being offensive killing free speech?” by Mick Hume, which I am currently reading.

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The New Age Censors: Banning Ideas By Labelling Them ‘Problematic’

Samuel Hooper19 Comments

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Declaring an idea or opinion to be “problematic” has become the activist Left’s tool of choice for shutting down debate and attacking free speech

I have a real issue with the recent hijacking and misappropriation of the word “problematic” by new generation feminists, trigger warning-toting student activists and the right-on Left in general. You could say that I find it…well, problematic.

Until recently, expressing a right-wing opinion or questioning the inexorable rise of identity culture might have seen you branded by the activist Left as being offensive, racist, sexist or oppressive in some other way. The criticism may well have been a shrill overreaction to a perfectly reasonable and valid point, but at least you knew where you stood and of what you were accused. Today, you are far more likely to be noted and quietly logged by the New Age Censors as being “problematic” – someone possessing opinions which do not properly conform to the current orthodoxy.

Take the insult that is university-sponsored sexual consent classes for fully grown adults, in which lecture theatres full of browbeaten good guys (the few potential future rapists never attend, of course) are made to feel like they are a potential threat to society, and that sexual relations between autonomous individuals should be stripped of their intimacy through the adoption of affirmative consent checkpoints at every stage of the relationship.

Frank Furedi writes in Spiked:

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Cereal Killer Cafe vs The Selfish Anti-Gentrification Mob

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Anti Gentrification Mob

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Hipsters can be irritating, yes, but launching a pogrom against them is more than a little bit fascistic

One of the unintended new side-effects of gentrification in London seems to be roving bands of self-entitled class warriors, presuming to speak for the whole city when really they represent only themselves, carrying out Kristallnacht style pogroms against businesses that are insufficiently tatty, cheap or “authentically” working class.

The latest victim is the Cereal Killer Cafe in Brick Lane, a quirky and charming (if thoroughly Hipster-like) establishment selling international breakfast cereals in weird combinations, which I happened to visit for the first time only last weekend.

From the Guardian:

Hundreds of protesters attacked a cereal cafe in east London on Saturday night, daubing the word “scum” on the shop window and setting fire to an effigy of a police officer.

Riot police were called in to defend the Cereal Killer Cafe in Shoreditch after it was targeted by a large crowd of anti-gentrification activists carrying pigs’ heads and torches.

The owners of the cafe, which has been seen by some as a symbol of inequality in east London, said on Sunday that the attack left customers including children “terrified for their lives”.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that hipsters and their fashions can be annoying, pretentious, infuriating even. But marauding up and down the streets at night wearing masks, carrying flaming torches and breaking windows in response? That goes too far. And yet it is precisely the sort of behaviour we encourage when we indulge in intellectually lazy talk about the supposed “evils” of gentrification – or “social cleansing” as some are now calling it, in an attempt to fill us with the same horror we might feel about ethnic cleansing.

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Happy And Glorious

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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“You are part of the fabric of my life. The mother of our country. At age five I remember watching your wedding procession driving past with my family all eagerly leaning out of the window of a family friend’s flat. Of course our big celebration was our street party in West Drayton. I am the same age as Prince Charles and I remember from early on pictures and newsreels of Charles and Anne being shown to me as they grew. Through these I followed your travels around the world. As a 1960’s fashion model I modeled hats outside Buckingham Palace the newspapers imagined Princess Anne would wear. Your travels, events and duties have been threads that have run throughout my life” – Sandra Vigon

This tribute, offered by a Telegraph reader on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth II becoming Britain’s longest reigning monarch, is poignant and undeniably true.

Every British person born over the past six decades has known no other monarch, seen no other figure represented on their currency, celebrated no Christmas without the Queen’s annual message to her people. In hundreds of small ways, the Queen is part of the fabric of both our individual lives and also our shared national life.

Presented with a blank sheet of paper, nobody would design a hereditary monarchy as the preferred mechanism for producing a ceremonial head of state. And yet it has worked tolerably well for Britain, particularly these past couple of centuries.

The head says that a federal system with an elected head of state would make far more sense – fairer, logical, more egalitarian and less of an anachronism than the curiosity which is the British monarchy. The head says that pledging allegiance to a person rather than a flag or a constitution is quaint at best, and downright dangerous at worst. The head clamours for a constitutional convention and the bold re-imagining of the twenty-first century state. But not so the heart.

The heart is glad for what we have, odd though it is by modern standards: the capsuled history of our country represented by a single person of flesh and blood. The heart looks with pride and gratitude on the lifetime of service dutifully performed by Queen Elizabeth II – a role never democratically bestowed, but fulfilled far more faithfully and proficiently than can be said of many an elected official. And the heart shudders to think what would become of Britain if our head of state was drawn from the same pool of glib, superficial careerists as many of our politicians.

The day will come – not, we pray, for some years yet – when we will have to face these issues and reshape our country for a new age, looking the future square in the eye. But not today. Today, we can be thankful for a duty faithfully discharged for 63 years and counting. An anachronism, yes, but still an example to us all.

Congratulations, your Majesty.

God save the Queen.

Queen Elizabeth II coronation

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